What is the thread that connects grief to its object? Is it not love? Is grief then, not a loss of love but a return?
Grief has visited me a lot in this past month. Through this process, I’ve been brought to my knees. Volition has melted into yielding. Firmness into ease. Fury into mourning. Abundance into void.
I learned that grief is an opening where one becomes malleable. Structures are broken down, opened up, and potentially made workable again. But without the awareness that the grieving must be had, a return to love cannot be realized.
Sorrow arises in the loss or absence of someone or something we love, a missed opportunity, or a catastrophic event. Grief whispers “Life will never be the same.” Our seeing and sensing, the subjectivity of the human experience, is altered.
Homes we once knew turned to dust. People disappear from our lives with little trace. Experiences become simple and inadequate memories – smells, tastes, and touch never to be had again in matching constellation. Cultures and identities reshaped in a blink. The fragility of life comes beckoning to our front door.
Sometimes the ephemeral knocks softly, many times it bangs, but often it busts the doors off the hinges. Without warning or permission, we’re faced with the darkness of life. Death. Our plans and ideals are ground down to a sense of powerlessness. The agenda erased and then rewritten for us in a dream of chaos. This is the crack where mourning can find its way through.
As we look back on what we have lost, we have a choice. Grief is not the subversive type. He’s a gentleman. He stands there, quite obviously, waiting for our engagement. In other words, we have to let grief in.
Once we say yes, we start a journey into a heart that breaks and aches for what it once had. The sense of loss washes through us with waves of emotion. Pain echoes deep in the undercurrents of the body. When we say yes we also open to the intensity of these feelings.
Slowly, we ebb and flow from the barrier of the known to a world unimaginable before the experience of loss. The blessing of grief is that, when given in to, life can emerge in profoundly new ways. We find possibilities concealed in the letting go. We rise to vistas where we have the opportunity to honor what was given through whatever we lost.
However, grief needs space and conditions. We live in an environment where space is often not given to this process. If given the conditions, it’s usually only for a limited timeframe. Then we must make something of ourselves again to be a utility for the world.
We hear the collective tendency to bypass grief through the likes of “The world is a messed up place”, “What can we do?”, “They’ve gone to a better place”, “There are so many other men/women/people out there for you”, “I should have gotten over it by now”, etc.
The question isn’t whether we give up something in flight from our bereavement – that seems obvious – but rather what is it that we lose? I would argue that we squander the opportunity for wholeness to transform our lives.
We grieve because we love.
The two, grief and love, are in a reciprocal relationship. The great Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hahn described reciprocity as “things waiting on each other so they can manifest together.”
They depend on each other. One cannot be had without the other near to it. Love is inherent, unconditional, and unlimited but we can only express such for a limited time. The fabric of human life is threaded with anguish because we cannot understand why we find ourselves in such a predicament.
Life has its way. Creation, stabilization, and transformation in a repetitious cycle. We see it as a line, but it’s millions of tiny dots creating what appears as the line. Dots which in themselves have a circular universe of their own – sensations, emotions, thoughts, relationships – each one arising and fading like waves of the ocean.
We’re forever in movement – shifting, undulating, vibrating, concealing, revealing, expanding, contracting. In a split moment, if we’re attentive enough to perceive the rapid fluctuation of our inner environment, we will find many contradictions. When we stay nested in the center of polarities, space for healing and peace expands from within. Melting us into the core of life, a medley of conflicting arrangements all tugging against one another for our attention.
When giving ourselves to grief, we may meet something surprising, our love. The deepest and perhaps most essential part of our humanity. It may be confusing, but that’s exactly the point. It takes us beyond ration. Life is not as black and white as we often paint it to be.
The point is that grief is a necessary process in our evolution that has been privatized. It doesn’t quench the thirst of the capital markets. It’s seen as something you get through. Removed from the center of our villages to the outskirts of our dystopic and alienated nation-states, we no longer see the opportunity in mourning. And since we often do it alone, the cycle of separation repeats itself.
This all has its place. “Getting over it” skips the painful part. It’s a useful strategy to not feel. But where we think we have moved beyond something with the hyper-logical and solution-oriented strategy of meaning making, we are just sitting on top of an iceberg. We have quite literally “gotten over (above) it.” But grief will wait. Again, he’s forebearing.
At some point, we will have to look. Life learns, develops, and grows when it looks at what was once born and animate. It calls on us to look. Nothing has been born out of consciousness in vain and nothing will die overlooked.
You see, maybe the preciousness of life is contained in our grief. Maybe it’s time that we take the ridiculous and irrational step of stopping the incessant drive forward and turn towards our sorrow in the desperate walk to finding our way.
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